From strawberry picker to Google, Watsonville woman urges Latinx youth into tech

When Diana Marquez-De La Torre was growing up in Watsonville, her parents, who were farmworkers at the time, made her and her brother spend one summer picking strawberries alongside them.

The siblings were in charge of their own fields, and had to plant, grow, and pick their strawberries.

"They were like, 'If you don't go to school, this is what you're going to end up doing," said Marquez-De La Torre. "'We want better for you.'"

"Afterwards, strawberries didn't taste as good to me," she said, laughing. "They're not worth it."

The lesson stuck, and both Marquez-De La Torre and her older brother went to college. She now works at Google and encourages Latinx youth to explore jobs in technology, but the journey was far from easy, she said. 

She said that fewer than 10% of computer science degrees are awarded to Latinx people, and that fewer than 5% of high-tech workers at top companies like Facebook, Apple and Google are Latinx.

"We need your perspective," Marquez-De La Torre told a room full to the brim of Latinx  Salinas Valley students Saturday.

As a teen attending Aromas School , Marquez-De La Torre was more focused on being a teacher than working in tech, she said.

Her first exposure to coding came from Myspace, where she fiddled with CSS, Java and HTML for her friends' profiles, since her parents wouldn't allow her to have one herself.  

"I would fiddle around at home, but the actual coding, the actual changes I would do at school because there I could use Myspace and not get in trouble."

In college at Stanford University, she began taking tech-focused classes, but after failing a class, she began to doubt herself and re-focused her education.

That imposter syndrome -- feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt, despite ability -- was intrinsically tied up in feeling like a fish out of water, she said.

Coming from Watsonville, a majority-Mexican town, Marquez-De La Torre said didn't know how to adapt to attending a majority-white college. And as a first-generation college student, she sometimes found herself bewildered by certain aspects of college life.

"I think as a first-generation college student...you're not prepared when you go to college," said Marquez-De La Torre. "And when it's a place that's so different from the place you grew up in, you don't have the skills necessary for failure and a lack of support system there. I think it's easy to take any failure that does eventually happen, to take it more personal and stop trying."

Marquez-De La Torre now advocates for better support for first-generation college students to help them feel more confident when encountering setbacks in an environment so new to them. 

After graduation, Marquez-De La Torre worked in politics, but soon realized she wanted to get back into tech. Her "ah-hah" moment came when she was speaking to a group of Latinx students, urging them to bring their perspectives to the tech industry.

She made the switch back to tech, working as a software engineer. She was the only woman on her team, and the only Latinx person as well.

That's when imposter syndrome set back in, she said. So she battled back by upping her game in every aspect: she dressed better than everyone on her team, read more than anyone else, and went through her colleagues' coding projects, trying to learn from them. 

What she found, she said, was that they weren't necessarily that much smarter than she was. They just didn't have the same anxiety she did about fitting in.

"When it came down to writing an app or building an algorithm, we were on the same page," she said.

During this time, Marquez-De La Torre spent a year in a master's program at the University of Texas at Austin, driving from her home in New Orleans every Thursday evening. She would spend Friday and Saturday in classes, and then drive back to New Orleans every Sunday, making the 15-hour round-trip every weekend for a year.

Within a month of graduation, Marquez-De La Torre had a job as a software engineer.

She took the confidence from her previous job into her next role at General Electric co. and soon became a team lead. A year later, Google recruited her to work for them, bringing her back to the Bay Area.

"Sometimes, I sit back and think if I hadn't let my imposter syndrome kick in at the beginning of my career -- if I had done more science, if I had taken more math classes, -- where would I be now?" Marquez-De La Torre asked. "Because when you doubt yourself, when you feel like you don't belong, it's hard to want to pursue something like that."

In Marquez-De La Torre's experience, imposter sydrome is universal among women, black people, Latinx people and minorities working in tech, she said.

"It's much easier to feel that you don't belong there and you're not sure why they hired you," Marquez-De La Torre said. "When I talk to some of my other counterparts that don't have that fear, it's much more relaxed work situation."

Now, Marquez-De La Torre works to facilitate tech for people through her work at Google as a people technologist. And outside work hours, she speaks at conferences and events such as Saturday's "Hackathon," or coding marathon, at Hartnell Community College. Saturday she encouraged the Latinx youth in attendance to explore jobs in STEM fields, be that in coding or in something else.

"We need to start teaching tech isn't just coding," said Marquez-De La Torre. "No matter what skill you have, tech is going to be in your life, and you can be in tech if you want to. You don't need to know (coding) to be in tech."

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Kate Cimini is a multimedia journalist for The Californian. Have a tip? Call her at (831) 776-5137 or email kcimini@thecalifornian.com.Subscribe to support local journalism.